Tomado de:
https://sites.google.com/site/entrevistasbeatles/entrevista-con-robert-rosen
First of all, I’d like the readers of this blog to meet you. Could you please introduce yourself?
Hello, readers of “Beatlebooks.blogspot.com.” My name is Robert Rosen, but you can call me Bob. I’m the author of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.
Most people who are familiar with my work know me through this book,
which has been a best-seller in the US, the UK, Japan, Mexico, and
Colombia.
I’ve
been a professional writer since 1974, and my stories on such topics as
the Pentagon, politics, and pornography (as well as Lennon) have
appeared in Mother Jones, The Soho Weekly News, Uncut, Proceso and Reforma (Mexico), Paniko and The Clinic (Chile), Headpress, Swank, High Society, La Repubblica (Italy), VSD (France), El Heraldo (Colombia), and The Village Voice. I’ve recently completed a book about the history of pornography called Beaver Street.
I live in Manhattan with my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, a musician and songwriter—please check out her CD, Blue Lights—and a writer of short stories and plays. Nowhere Man is dedicated to her.
Could you tell us how your life and John Lennon's life crossed? What memories have you got of him?
Other than as a fan who first saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show
in 1964, and followed them as a group and as individuals for the next
16 years, my entire “personal” relationship with Lennon took place when I
transcribed, edited, and virtually memorized his diaries, which his
assistant, Fred Seaman, who was my friend at the time, gave me a few
months after Lennon was murdered. The diaries were supposed to be source
material for a Lennon biography that Fred asked me to help him write. I
tell this story in the opening chapter of Nowhere Man.
What do you remember doing at the time John Lennon was killed?
December
8, 1980, a Monday, was Jim Morrison’s birthday. I was home alone in my
apartment in uptown Manhattan that night listening to a Doors special on
WPLJ, a local radio station. A few weeks earlier, Fred had given me
some “Tai” weed from Lennon’s stash. There were a few crumbs left, so I
rolled a joint and smoked it.
The
news that Lennon had been shot came over the radio around 11 o’clock.
They didn’t say he was dead and I assumed that he wasn’t badly hurt. I
switched to another radio station—WNEW-FM—to listen to Vin Scelsa’s
show. (New York still had good commercial radio stations in those days,
and Scelsa had an especially good progressive rock show.) He said that
John Lennon was dead. His voice was breaking. He was in a state of
shock. And he put on “Let It Be.” I went into the living room and turned
on the TV. It was all over the news. I was stunned, not only by the
murder, but because I knew that it was going to have a direct impact on
my life. I called the Dakota to talk to Fred. I wanted to tell him that I
couldn’t believe it, and that I was sorry. But I couldn’t get him on
the phone.
I
took the subway down to the Dakota around midnight, just to be there
with everybody else. I ran into an artist I knew from my cab-driving
days, Peter Melocco, and we hung out there for a few hours. Everybody
was crying, and holding up the newspaper headlines, and playing “A Day
in the Life” over and over on their boom boxes.
I also wrote about that night in the opening chapter of Nowhere Man.
(The US paperback edition from Quick American Archives contains some
excerpts from my diaries from that night that aren’t in the other
editions.)
The
book starts with some strange and disappointing stories about your
relationship with Fred Seaman, Lennon’s personal assistant. What do you remember about him?
Fred was my friend, neighbor, and colleague for many years. I was his editor on our City College newspaper, Observation Post,
which is where we met in 1973. He was always a big supporter of my
writing. We hung out, we partied, we worked together, and we traveled
together. I even worked for his uncle Norman at one point, and
collaborated on musical-comedy skits with his father, Eugene, who was a
classical musician. So I guess I was like family.
When
Fred got the Lennon job (through his uncle Norman, who was friends with
John and Yoko) it was only natural that he asked me to help him write a
book about Lennon. I trusted him implicitly, which I obviously
shouldn’t have. Looking back on it, there were a lot of warning signs,
like Fred telling me that he was “above the law.” I ignored these
things—or chose to ignore them because I was so into the material and
doing the book. And I believed that we were doing what John wanted.
That’s what Fred kept telling me.
Now,
almost 29 years later, I tend to see Fred as a weak and tragic figure
who was in way over his head. I think that his proximity to Lennon and
Ono, and their seemingly unlimited wealth and fame, literally drove him
insane with greed and envy. I think that drugs and alcohol—and there
were a lot going around—played a part in it, too. I think that Fred was
so angry at Ono, especially after Lennon was murdered, that he felt
completely justified in ripping her off and ripping me off—because I was
just a pawn in his scheme, and by the end I was getting in his way and
asking too many questions.
He
had the keys to my apartment. He lied to me. He sent me out of town.
Then he ransacked my apartment and stole everything I was working on.
And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to completely forgive that kind of
betrayal.
To
write this book you had to decipher Lennon’s writing and thoughts.
Actually, you must be one of the unique persons on this planet that has
done such a job. What did this hard work mean to you?
Fred brought John’s diaries to my house in May 1981. He pulled the 1980 journal, a New Yorker magazine desk diary, out of a shopping bag and put it on my desk.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Just look at it,” he said.
I
thumbed through the book. There was a lot of almost indecipherable
handwriting, and a lot of newspaper clippings and pictures of Beatles.
Then it hit me: “Holy shit! This is John’s diary.”
It
was clear from that moment that the diaries were the key to John’s
consciousness and to the “ultimate Lennon biography” that Fred said John
had told him to write in the event of his death. After living with the
diaries for a couple of weeks, and thumbing through them every day (this
was long before I began transcribing them), I knew that these books
were going to change my life. This was the assignment I’d been waiting
for. Still, it took me until October 1981 before I found the energy and
motivation to begin deciphering Lennon’s scrawls and codes and symbols
Then I just kept going at it every day, 16 hours a day, until I finished
the job. As I said in Nowhere Man,
when I finally broke through and began to understand everything he was
saying, it felt as if Lennon’s energy was flowing through me, especially
when I read his words out loud. Doing this work, in isolation in my
apartment in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, was bizarre and
thrilling. I saw the truth as I’d never seen it before.
...to be continued.
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